The present invention relates to disc drives. More particularly, the present invention relates to block codes used in data channels of disc drives.
A typical disc drive includes one or more magnetic discs mounted for rotation on a hub or spindle. A typical disc drive also includes a transducer supported by an air bearing which flies above each magnetic disc. The transducer and the air bearing are collectively referred to as a data head. A drive controller is conventionally used for controlling the disc drive based on commands received from a host system. The drive controller controls the disc drive to retrieve information from the magnetic discs and to store information on the magnetic discs.
An electromechanical actuator operates within a negative feedback, closed-loop servo system. The actuator moves the data head radially over the disc surface for track seek operations and holds the transducer directly over a track on the disc surface for track following operations.
Information is typically encoded and stored in concentric tracks on the surface of magnetic discs by providing a write signal to the data head to encode flux reversals on the surface of the magnetic disc representing the data to be stored. In retrieving data from the disc, the drive controller controls the electromechanical actuator so that the data head flies above the magnetic disc, sensing the flux reversals on the magnetic disc, and generating a read signal based on those flux reversals. The read signal is typically conditioned and then decoded by a read channel or the drive controller to recover data represented by flux reversals stored on the magnetic disc, and consequently represented in the read signal provided by the data head.
A communication channel represented by such a disc drive includes an encoder which encodes user input data, the data head, the medium (e.g., the magnetic or optical disc), preconditioning logic (such as amplifiers, filters, a gain loop, a sampler, a timing loop, and clock generation), a data detector, and a decoder for decoding the detected data to provide an output indicative of estimated user data.
Generally, there are two types of encoding techniques used in communication channels. These are block encoding and convolution encoding techniques. Block coding techniques are typically used in disc drives and are well suited for correcting burst errors and imposing certain properties (constraints) in the encoded data which are useful in subsequent data processing. One type of block code is a Run-Length-Limited (RLL) code which limits the number of flux transitions which occur in a sequence. Advanced data storage systems frequently use error-correction encoding concatenated with RLL encoding.
A block encoder and decoder having a rate of m/n for encoding data in blocks can be implemented using two tables which are related to the size of the block. The encoder is formed by a table having 2.sup.m .times.n data entries and the decoder may be formed by a table having 2.sup.n .times.m data entries. However, for large values of m and n, these tables become prohibitively large and cannot be practically implemented in a disc drive storage system.
One approach which is used to implement block encoding in systems having relatively large values of m and n is to only encode a portion of each data word. The remainder of the data word is left unencoded. For example, a common technique to implement a 16/17 rate code is to leave the first eight bits unencoded and encode the remaining eight bits into nine bits. In this manner, the complexity of the encoder is comparable to that of a 8/9 rate encoder. The disadvantage is that eight bits are passed through unencoded and cannot be used to impose code constraints, such as run length limits.
The present invention provides a solution to this and other problems, and offers advantages over the prior art.